Tome Describes Rules Of Superstition

February 21, 1987|By CLARENCE PETERSEN, Chicago Tribune

To dream of an ax is unlucky; it is an omen of death or at least of terrible danger. When fishing, don`t wear white; it brings bad luck. Never take flowers aboard an airplane or ship; that`s bad luck, too. If the flowers are a mixed bunch of reds and whites, that`s worse.

You can look all that up in a new British paperback, The Dictionary of Superstitions, by Jean-Luc Caradeau and Cecile Donner, French journalists who write of the occult. Nothing in 163 pages suggests they are pulling your leg.

``Don`t defy the ladder,`` they advise. That is to say, don`t walk under it or reach for anything or hand over anything between the rungs of a ladder. Your faithful correspondent learned as much by falling from a ladder and fracturing a wrist. As luck would have it, the accident took place long ago, when one could not successfully sue a ladder company for his own stupidity.

Would that he had known this: If you do accidentally defy the ladder, the authors say, cross your fingers until you meet a dog; or maintain absolute silence until you have seen a four-legged animal of any kind; or spit three times through the rungs of a ladder or once over your left shoulder; or spit on your shoe and walk straight, taking care not to look back until the wet mark has dried.

Evidently, running your life on superstition can be a lot of work. Lovers who carve their initials on a tree, it says here, are wasting their time unless they use a new knife bought especially for the occasion, then bury the knife at the foot of the tree, cover the hole and make love on that spot.

``Only under these conditions,`` the authors aver, ``will your love grow with the tree.``